The front office that never sleeps

Nowadays, it is becoming increasingly common to pay for all kinds of purchases using cashless means of payment, such as cards, smartphones or smartwatches. This is quick, easy, independent of currency, accepted globally and has become even more popular with users for hygiene reasons since the start of the pandemic.

Only very few people are aware that an amazing amount of activity is going on in the background. In 300 milliseconds, which is a barely noticeable length of time, various data is sent back and forth between the bank, merchant and cardholder when a transaction is made before the “Payment accepted” notification appears. This is not just about checking the ability to enter into the transaction or whether the card belongs to the assigned bank and the identified cardholder. Among other things, queries also take place to ascertain whether the account has sufficient funds and whether the cardholder is old enough to purchase an age-restricted service.

Around 100 employees work at the Biel location in three different areas: Acquiring, Issuing and Terminal Integration. The teams speak at least three official Swiss national languages every day, as well as English.

Christoph Anderegg’s team is also part of the front office. Working together with five colleagues, he programmes the interface between the terminal and a merchant’s integrated cash register system. The Head of the POI Development Department compares the complexity of the software with the diversity of a language: “Our team uses data formats to describe how the two systems of the terminal and cash register talk to one another. This includes syntax, grammar and words that we represent using data formats so that a payment can successfully be made.” The transactions that a customer may wish to process can be as diverse as a language. An example of this is a hotel booking: The amount is reserved on the card to be debited at a later date when it becomes payable. Another example is a ticket purchase when the machine only prints one of the two purchased tickets because it runs out of paper. In this case, the cash register may only debit the correct amount for one ticket. In both cases, it is important that communication between the terminal and cash register is tailored to the situation.

Further, the POI Development Department is responsible for enabling communication with foreign systems because each country has its own communication standards that a terminal has to be able to implement, in order to provide the cash register with the correct information. The TIM server (Till Integration Module) provides this kind of log translation and communicates between the terminal and/or e-commerce platform and the cash register system in the respective language.
 

We are very proud of our front office team in Biel as they work hard every day to ensure that our customers and partners are happy. We would like to thank all our employees for their hard work, motivation, creativity and loyalty.